The Integrated Crop Pollination Project aims to improve the sustainability of specialty crop pollination across the U.S. The project is a partnership of 15 different institutions working to identify how best to achieve effective and economical crop pollination.

During spring 2017, the project team developed six webinars on crop pollination. These cover almond, apple, blueberry, cherry, pumpkin, and watermelon pollination issues, and they are all available to watch here.

The project is increasingly focused on getting the research delivered to farmers across the country.

“This team has conducted research from California to Pennsylvania in a wide array of crops and we are now translating our research results into guidelines,” says Rufus Isaacs, Project Director of the Integrated Crop Pollination Project and MSU Professor in the Department of Entomology. “With so much concern about pollinator health, we hope these resources can help farmers do their part to enhance bees on their farms and to also enhance their crop’s pollination.”

So far, the Integrated Crop Pollination Project team has trained more than 20,500 stakeholders in specialty crop pollination techniques via in-person workshops and presentations.

In addition to these resources, the Integrated Crop Pollination team has developed the groundwork for an online Pollination Mapper system.

“Pollination Mapper will provide insights and guidance to specialty crop growers as they make decisions about how best to pollinate their crops by harnessing the results of our research combined with modern online computing power,” says Isaacs. “We look forward to rolling that out in the future.